I have been the target of the occasional troll and I confess that a few have bothered me greatly. From now on I have the perfect antidote: Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets Live!

Chris Lehmann, writing in John Boehner left because Republicans’ true faith is incompatible with governing for The Guardian, observes:

The real significance of Boehner’s surprise announcement of his resignation, though, is that the content-challenged grandstanding of the government shutdown is no longer simply a tactic to let off steam, or to enhance a given House member’s fundraising numbers among the right-wing base; it is the Republican party’s model of governance, tout court. The American right has demonstrated that again and again over a decades-long campaign to gain control of political institutions with the express aim of dramatizing the inefficiency, corruption, and profligacy of the very idea of government. It’s akin to seeing a child smash an X-Box controller into a wall, over and over again, and then proceed to wail over the mangled wreckage that the breakdown was entirely due to a design flaw.

From where does this infantile rage arise? Well, Nock’s 80-year-old manifesto is a good place to look.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

Do we need to hire Supernanny to take over Congress the nursery?

Yet another reason to not drive Adolf Hitler’s people’s car.

I had a talk with a friend recently who happened to mention that the Cleveland City Planning department years ago was busily preparing the city’s new downtown master plan in the late 1950s.

It was a useless plan costing $100,000.

He laughed because he said that meanwhile another city official was planning what was actually to become the plan for downtown.

It would make the official city planner’s plan null and void even before it was published.

The truth is that neither city official really was producing a plan that the city would actually use to revamp downtown. Or try to.

A business/civic group was doing the plan that would be used, though not well.

Therein lays the truth about power and who runs this city and any other.

Not your elected officials. So voting often is much of a charade.

Eric Grubb was the planning director. My knowledgeable friend—who became a city official himself later—felt that James Lister, urban renewal Continue Reading »

When we look back at 2015 I doubt we will think of favorable comparisons to 1789, 1848 or 1917, but I do think the “R” word will be included.

Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt deliver something on this topic in this morning’s long-read for The Guardian in: The Corbyn earthquake—how Labour was shaken to its foundations.

This should be your reading priority today.

The summer of 2015 will be remembered as a moment when something wholly unexpected happened in British politics—and a 115-year-old political party was transformed in three short months.

All that was required to push that transformation was for a single person to stand.

At that time, nobody in Corbyn’s fledgling campaign—including the candidate himself—would have believed that he would go on to win the leadership contest by a huge majority three months later. Their most pressing concern at the start of June was getting him on the ballot, and then trying not to finish last. But the man dismissed by many as an irrelevant loner on the political margins would soon deliver what the former lord chancellor Lord Falconer described this week as “an earthquake”.

If they are feeling the shake in England, we are feeling the Bern here in the United States.

“The rallies took on a life of their own,” Lewis recalled. He sensed an almost religious fervour at some of the events, including one in his hometown of Norwich in early August. “I’m an atheist and I’m acutely aware of the hard-headedness of politics, I know the religious element won’t win elections, but it can help. Jeremy is Jeremy: he isn’t a rock star politician, he doesn’t have the looks, he doesn’t wear slick clothes, but in a way he is an antihero. He’s genuine, authentic and he just seems to have resonated with people.”

If I were a conspiracy theorist—I’m not, Abbie Hoffman set me straight on that point back in the early ’80s—I’d think that Jeremy and Bernie were in some cabal.

One campaign manager now admits that none of this desperate wrangling did any good. “The fact was Jeremy Corbyn did a very good job in turning his campaign into a referendum on politics. His team understood the anti-politics feeling out there—and we looked suited and booted. We looked like the Westminster bubble on stage.”

By the time Corbyn wrapped up his campaign on 8 September in Nuneaton—the marginal seat that had come to symbolise Labour’s failure in the general election—his victory was unstoppable.

Anytime someone in politics use the world unstoppable, I shudder. I sent Bernie another $100 this morning, in advance of the end-of-month accounting deadline for reporting, because I’m not going accept the battle is over until its over, on election day. Bernie is no Molly.

[Update on 25 September—After Beheading 100 People This Year, Saudi Arabia Joins U.N. Human Rights Council With U.S. Support.]

[Update on 24 September—Add The Jewish Voice to the mix with this headline:

Saudi Arabia to Select Experts for UN Human Rights Council]

[Update on 23 September—More stories about the appointment of Faisal bin Hassan Trad are showing up:

Why Is Saudi Arabia Heading the U.N. Human Rights Council?
Anger as Saudi gets key United Nations rights post
U.N. Criticized for ‘Scandalous’ Appointment of Saudi to Human Rights Panel*
Saudi Arabia appointed to chair UN Human Rights Council
Selection of Saudia Arabia to head United Nations human rights panel sparks anger
*This story made Breitbart heads explode I’m sure.]

Yesterday I posted about the United Nations deciding to appoint Faisal bin Hassan Trad as the chair of a panel of five ambassadors, known as the Consultative Group, which oversee the U.N.’s Human Rights Council. For the first time since I began using a Google Alert to track stories about imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi back in April, more than a couple headlines showed up in my inbox:

UN appointing Saudi official to top human rights job is inhuman;
U.N. Watchdog Slams ‘Scandalous’ Choice of Saudi Arabia to Head Human Rights Panel;
United Nations Criticized For Choosing Saudi Arabia To Head Human Rights Panel;
“States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear”;
Fury after Saudi Arabia ‘chosen to head key UN human rights panel’; and
Saudi UN Human Rights Panel appointment shows money, Politics trump justice.

This is good news. The question must be asked however, will the outrage continue beyond today or is this just a blip of outrage?

If you tell a lie enough times, people will begin to accept the lie as truth. There are many such lies floating around—humans only use 10 percent of their brains, leaps to mind—but this morning I’m thinking about another, one not started by, but most certainly given a mainstream push by, President John F. Kennedy: In the Chinese language, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters, one representing danger and the other, opportunity.

That’s factually wrong. Enough motivational speakers, however, have repeated the president’s words enough times that in the more than 50 years since, generations have taken the message to heart and taken every crisis, no matter how horrific, as an opportunity and brought us to Disaster Capitalism.

Stephen W. Thrasher, writing in Disaster capitalism is a permanent state of life for too many Americans for The Guardian tell us:

In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein defined “disaster capitalism” as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting marketing opportunities”. She was riffing on neoconservatives using Hurricane Katrina as an excuse for a New Orleans land grab. She witnessed the same phenomenon in the 2004 Asian Tsunami and in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq.

The concept of public plunder after disaster has been embraced in similar linguistic terms by Democrats and Republicans alike. Condoleezza Rice famously called 9/11 an “enormous opportunity”, and indeed it was a profitable one, for war contractors anyway. Similarly, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before”. Emanuel was good to his word. While American workers lost their jobs, lost their homes and even took their own lives as a result of the 2008 financial meltdown, the Obama White House instituted financial “reforms” that arrested no Wall Street executives, and left even Forbes predicting “ten reasons why there will be another systematic financial crisis”.

In New York City, Thrasher continues:

The New York Post, no bastion of bleeding heart liberalism, reported on Monday that “Hundreds of full-time city workers are homeless”. These are people who clean our trash and make our city, the heart of American capitalism, safe and livable, including for those who plunder the globe from Wall Street. These are men and women, living in shelters and out of their cars, who have government jobs—the kind of workers conservatives love to paint as greedy, gluttonous pigs.

When a full time government worker can’t “find four walls and a roof to call his own” in the city he serves, we are living in a perpetual state of disaster capitalism.

Now hundreds in a city of millions can seem insignificant, but this crisis is systemic and I do see an opporutnity here, an opporutnity to ogranize and ensure that this situation, in both the public and private sectors, does not continue.

Bernie Sanders has this to say on the topic:

Millions of Americans are working for totally inadequate wages. We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty. The current federal minimum wage is starvation pay and must become a living wage. We must increase it to $15 an hour over the next several years.

We must also establish equal pay for women. It’s unconscionable that women earn less than men for performing the same work.

Millions of American employees have been working 50 or 60 hours a week while receiving no overtime pay. That is why Bernie has been encouraging the Obama Administration to ensure that more workers receive overtime pay protection. The Administration’s new rule extending that protection to everyone making less than $947 a week is a step in the right direction. It is a win for our economy and for our workers.

Lastly, we must support and strengthen the labor movement to ensure that workers have a say in their own economic futures. That’s why Bernie has been a strong supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively.

This last, support of the Employee Free Choice Act, is vital. Only when workers organize to bargain collectively, can the rampant pillage of the American middle class be fought.

The moral standing of the federal and various state governments of the United States on matters of execution are iffy at best—beheading is cleaner and less painful than strapping someone to a horizontal cross and then pumping poisons into their body in a manner that causes pain for more than 30 minutes before they finally die—but that does not give the citizens of the United States, or any country for that matter, a pass on continued barbarity of the Royal House of Saud and Saudi Arabia.

Glenn Greenwald, in U.S. State Department “Welcomes” News That Saudi Arabia Will Head U.N. Human Rights Panel for The//Intercept writes”

Last week’s announcement that Saudi Arabia—easily one of the world’s most brutally repressive regimes—was chosen to head a U.N. Human Rights Council panel provoked indignation around the world. That reaction was triggered for obvious reasons. Not only has Saudi Arabia executed more than 100 people already this year, mostly by beheading (a rate of 1 execution every two days), and not only is it serially flogging dissidents, but it is reaching new levels of tyrannical depravity as it is about to behead and then crucify the 21-year-old son of a prominent regime critic, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was convicted at the age of 17 of engaging in demonstrations against the government.

Most of the world may be horrified at the selection of Saudi Arabia to head a key U.N. human rights panel, but the U.S. State Department most certainly is not. Quite the contrary: its officials seem quite pleased about the news.

Here’s the exchange.

MR. TONER: Right. I mean, we’ve talked about our concerns about some of the capital punishment cases in Saudi Arabia in our Human Rights Report, but I don’t have any more to add to it.

QUESTION: So you—

QUESTION: Well, how about a reaction to them heading the council?

MR. TONER: Again, I don’t have any comment, don’t have any reaction to it. I mean, frankly, it’s—we would welcome it. We’re close allies [Emphasis Glenn Greenwald]. If we—

QUESTION: Do you think that they’re an appropriate choice given—I mean, how many pages is—does Saudi Arabia get in the Human Rights Report annually?

Making friends and allies of monsters is, of course, nothing new for the United States, but no one gets to be surprised when they learn that people hate us, not for our freedom, but for friends.

Previously…

The Guardian emails:

Dear Jeff,

This is an incredible news!

The worldwide divestment movement that you have supported through your backing for the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign has now grown to over 400 organisations—worth a colossal $2.6 trillion (£1.68 trillion). The movement that started on American university campuses has now spread to faith groups, philanthropic funders, local authorities and pension funds in over 40 countries. In the last year, the total assets managed by funds that have decided to divest has grown 50-fold.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben who set up 350.org, the NGO that has spearheaded the divestment movement, said: “In the hottest year we’ve ever measured on our planet, big institutions and organisations are finally stepping up to say: we won’t participate in this charade, and we will stand up to the fossil fuel companies that are causing it. A 50-fold increase is a sign that civil society is finally fully on the move in the battle against climate change”.

This is a big statement from civil society.

Best wishes,

James Randerson
Assistant national news editor

The Guardian emails:

Dear Jeff,

This is an incredible news!

The worldwide divestment movement that you have supported through your backing for the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign has now grown to over 400 organisations—worth a colossal $2.6 trillion (£1.68 trillion). The movement that started on American university campuses has now spread to faith groups, philanthropic funders, local authorities and pension funds in over 40 countries. In the last year, the total assets managed by funds that have decided to divest has grown 50-fold.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben who set up 350.org, the NGO that has spearheaded the divestment movement, said: “In the hottest year we’ve ever measured on our planet, big institutions and organisations are finally stepping up to say: we won’t participate in this charade, and we will stand up to the fossil fuel companies that are causing it. A 50-fold increase is a sign that civil society is finally fully on the move in the battle against climate change”.

This is a big statement from civil society.

Best wishes,

James Randerson
Assistant national news editor

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

My time in the Navy predated women on combat ships, but there was nothing in my job–NEC 0986—that required any physical or mental skill that would have prohibited a woman from doing the same work. I did serve in a non-combat unit—platform instructor for the Ohio Military Academy—for three years where women were part of the cadre. Again, there was no distinction between the men and women I served with as regarded the physical or mental rigor demanded.

All of this is to say that I find the uproar over women in combat a smoke screen for tired arguments. If women (Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver) can survive (and I use that word advisedly) Ranger training; if Benari Poulton a 130 lbs., 5’4 man, can be a Master Sergeant in the Army, what are the detractors talking about?

I do remember this aboard the USS Reasoner (FF 1063)…

[Update on 24 September—Add The Jewish Voice to the mix with this headline:

Saudi Arabia to Select Experts for UN Human Rights Council]

[Update on 23 September—More stories about the appointment of Faisal bin Hassan Trad are showing up:

Why Is Saudi Arabia Heading the U.N. Human Rights Council?
Anger as Saudi gets key United Nations rights post
U.N. Criticized for ‘Scandalous’ Appointment of Saudi to Human Rights Panel*
Saudi Arabia appointed to chair UN Human Rights Council
Selection of Saudia Arabia to head United Nations human rights panel sparks anger
*This story made Breitbart heads explode I’m sure.]

Yesterday I posted about the United Nations deciding to appoint Faisal bin Hassan Trad as the chair of a panel of five ambassadors, known as the Consultative Group, which oversee the U.N.’s Human Rights Council. For the first time since I began using a Google Alert to track stories about imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi back in April, more than a couple headlines showed up in my inbox:

UN appointing Saudi official to top human rights job is inhuman;
U.N. Watchdog Slams ‘Scandalous’ Choice of Saudi Arabia to Head Human Rights Panel;
United Nations Criticized For Choosing Saudi Arabia To Head Human Rights Panel;
“States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear”;
Fury after Saudi Arabia ‘chosen to head key UN human rights panel’; and
Saudi UN Human Rights Panel appointment shows money, Politics trump justice.

This is good news. The question must be asked however, will the outrage continue beyond today or is this just a blip of outrage?

Yesterday I finished reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration (the paper version, The Atlantic is my sole magazine subscription these days) and then this morning I find Bernie Sanders’ We Must End For-Profit Prisons.

Bernie:

The United States is experiencing a major human tragedy. We have more people in jail than any other country on earth, including Communist China, an authoritarian country four times our size. The U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we incarcerate about a quarter of its prisoners—some 2.2 million people.

And Ta-Nehisi:

The Gray Wastes—our carceral state, a sprawling netherworld of prisons and jails—are a relatively recent invention. Through the middle of the 20th century, America’s imprisonment rate hovered at about 110 people per 100,000. Presently, America’s incarceration rate (which accounts for people in prisons and jails) is roughly 12 times the rate in Sweden, eight times the rate in Italy, seven times the rate in Canada, five times the rate in Australia, and four times the rate in Poland. America’s closest to-scale competitor is Russia—and with an autocratic Vladimir Putin locking up about 450 people per 100,000, compared with our 700 or so, it isn’t much of a competition. China has about four times America’s population, but American jails and prisons hold half a million more people. “In short,” an authoritative report issued last year by the National Research Council concluded, “the current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.”

Draw upon the same raw data.

Where Bernie is prescriptive, however, and focused on the present, Ta-Nehisi is descriptive, taking the long view to provide historical context and draw the reader in.

You should read both.

This was the introduction to Stephen Colbert’s interview with Bernie Sanders.

You can always feel comfortable that personnel changes by the Cleveland Browns will be forthrightly reported by the almost daily Plain Dealer.

Must keep the public informed, you know. That’s the job.

But when the Plain Dealer subtracts some its starters, well, that’s not really news. Not that important. The paper will come out anyway.

We can always fill space with larger sports photos.

So those personnel cuts aren’t that important to our almost daily news publication.

Well, truthfully, when you lose longtime reporters it does mean something.

And, I guess, we’ll report it if they won’t.

Taking buyouts are some long-time reporters. They include transportation reporter Alison Grant, veteran Ron Rutti, film critic Clint O’Connor, sports reporter D’Arcy Egan—and Gayle Powell, have taken buyouts. They’ll be out by the end of the month.

The PD was going to layoff six anyway so it seems one more should go soon.

Will we miss them? Probably not. We are getting used to being short-changed by the Plain Dealer. Back in the 1970s I guess it was the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But Cleveland wasn’t doing so well so the paper cut Cleveland from its name.

Now the newspaper Winston Churchill once called the best name ever for a newspaper can reduce it a bit more. Just call itself The Plain.

No frills. Less news. Lots of crime, sports, and downtown development. Otherwise, ask your neighbor to keep you up to date.

Meanwhile at city hall…

I caught an abbreviated news conference by Mayor Frank Jackson after the heartrending killings of two Cleveland children—5-year old Ramon Burnett and 3-year old Major Howard.

The photographs of the two loveable-looking children would tear anyone’s heart.

So it demanded a press conference.

Jackson looked tired. He looked older.

What struck me, however, was the Mayor’s lack of emotion.

He showed no passion, no anger, all appropriate to let the community know how much and how deeply he felt about these two sickening killings. Yes, he called them “innocents.” Not exactly dramatic.

When pre-schoolers are casualties of gun battles among teen-agers or youngsters a bit older how can anyone feel the community has not devolved to a totally unacceptable low.

Then we can read all the racist comments on the paper’s web site. Sickening, too. And so unnecessary. Take them down Rodrigue!

One reporter told me that Jackson was angrier at Zach Reed who proposed using $1 million for police overtime than the mayhem.

That won’t do the job either. Police aren’t the answer.

Jackson used the word “innocents” to describe the young children.

That seemed to be as far as he could go in attempting to tell the community how he felt. It wasn’t enough.

It’s really never enough with Mayor Jackson. Too bad.

By Roldo Bartimole…

Yesterday presidential candidate Ben Carson was asked if he could ever support a Muslim president. Carson, channeling a significant portion of the American electorate, said that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” This proclamation is presently receiving the rebuke that it deserves, though it could stand for even more, if only because of its ugly sanctimony.

Ben Carson is a Christian—a fact he shares in common with all our greatest domestic terrorists and self-styled Indian-killers. From slave-holding to ethnic cleansing, Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of complexity that Carson’s ilk do not grant to Islam. To Carson, Islam is terror and nothing else.

Christians, fully conscious of their own pedigree, need not completely renounce their faith, nor repudiate their scripture. (If a man seeks to plunder you, Dr. Seuss will suffice for showing cause.) But you would think a wise Christian would be more humble. Carson is neither humble nor wise. Carson is a bigot playing to a base that considers bigotry to be a feature, not a bug.

Then there was Larry Wilmore’s take…

[Update on 23 September—More stories about the appointment of Faisal bin Hassan Trad are showing up:

Why Is Saudi Arabia Heading the U.N. Human Rights Council?
Anger as Saudi gets key United Nations rights post
U.N. Criticized for ‘Scandalous’ Appointment of Saudi to Human Rights Panel*
Saudi Arabia appointed to chair UN Human Rights Council
Selection of Saudia Arabia to head United Nations human rights panel sparks anger
*This story made Breitbart heads explode I’m sure.]

Yesterday I posted about the United Nations deciding to appoint Faisal bin Hassan Trad as the chair of a panel of five ambassadors, known as the Consultative Group, which oversee the U.N.’s Human Rights Council. For the first time since I began using a Google Alert to track stories about imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi back in April, more than a couple headlines showed up in my inbox:

UN appointing Saudi official to top human rights job is inhuman;
U.N. Watchdog Slams ‘Scandalous’ Choice of Saudi Arabia to Head Human Rights Panel;
United Nations Criticized For Choosing Saudi Arabia To Head Human Rights Panel;
“States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear”;
Fury after Saudi Arabia ‘chosen to head key UN human rights panel’; and
Saudi UN Human Rights Panel appointment shows money, Politics trump justice.

This is good news. The question must be asked however, will the outrage continue beyond today or is this just a blip of outrage?

The continuing story of Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger sentenced to 10 years and 1,000 lashes for the crime of speaking his mind has taken a bizarre turn as the United Nations has appointed Faisal bin Hassan Trad as head of a key human rights panel that is tasked with naming experts that determine global human rights standards.

In Raif Badawi’s wife outraged as UN appoints Saudi Arabia rep to lead human rights panel for International Business News, Bauke Schram writes:

UN Watch director Hillel Neuer said that the choice is scandalous, saying that the country has beheaded more people in 2015 than the Islamic State has. “Petro-dollars and politics have trumped human rights,” he said. “Saudi Arabia has arguably the worst record in the world when it comes to religious freedom and women’s rights, and continues to imprison the innocent blogger Raif Badawi.

“This UN appointment is like making a pyromaniac into the town fire chief, and underscores the credibility deficit of a human rights council that already counts Russia, Cuba, China, Qatar and Venezuela among its elected members.”

Perhaps Faisal bin Hassan Trad is a moderate or even liberal appointed to provide his leverage with his own royal family, but some how I don’t think so.

Previously…